In the 1950s, two Yiddish-language encyclopedias of Jewish artists who died in the Holocaust were published. Remarkably enough, there was also a third and only slightly different work which almost appeared in the same decade but never made it into print. Alyssa Quint tells its story:

Der Jude und die Kunst Probleme der Gegenwart (“The Jew and the Problem of Art in Contemporary Times”) was written in German and prepared for publication in 1938 by the Austrian art historian Otto Schneid. The manuscript of this encyclopedia boasted a preface by the great German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber.

Schneid tried several times to publish his encyclopedia after the war, but he failed. Drafts of it (in German, Hebrew, and partially in English) are held in the University of Toronto’s Fisher Archive, where Schneid’s collection also includes letters that he received from artists throughout the 1930s and letters from surviving artists who wrote to him in the 1950s.

Schneid was a firsthand witness to the École de Paris, or School of Paris, and its robust Jewish component. . . . The art historian Edouard Roditi explains that many of these artists, especially between 1910 and 1940, were of East European Jewish origin, leading some to refer to this scene as the Jewish school of Paris or school of Montparnasse, for the Left Bank neighborhood where these Jewish artists lived and congregated. These were the artists that Schneid sought to document in real time.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.